Medieval Civilization

THE Latin which gave birth to the Romance languages was vulgar Latin, that is, the Latin of the common people. It accompanied the soldiers of the legions, the colons, and the emigrants of every kind, from Italy into the provinces, and thus became the language of the people of all Western Europe--the spoken, not the written, language. We can reconstruct this language to a certain extent, with the aid of the hints let fall by different writers, but only in a most general way... As for Brittany, it seems well proven to-day that the Celtic dialect, still current in its most remote districts, does not date back to the age of Gallic independence, but is merely an importation of the insular Britons who fled before the Saxons, from the fifth to the seventh centuries A.D. Thus, by a kind of paradox, it is when she is about to succumb that Rome wins this last triumph. But it is only a seeming paradox. We must not be deceived by the division of history into convenient periods. The prestige of Rome survived her material power. She still remained, for the different peoples, the mistress of the world and the benefactress of the human race. She had just been captured by Alaric when Rutilius sang her immortal destiny, and it is about the same epoch that there appears for the first time in our texts the newly coined Romania, so happily conceived to designate, in one word, her empire and her civilization. It is not a matter for surprise that the victories of Latin were prosecuted in the midst of events which destroyed Roman unity. ..